I was in Los Angeles for New Year’s Day for the second straight year, attending the Rose Parade again – this time in the company of my mother and my mother-in-law. Our total traveling party was five, and we had to negotiate trains and subways and buses and taxis and light rail with a mobility scooter and a lack of speed appropriate to a pair of septuagenarians. Union Station to downtown LA to Pasadena and all around in between, for four days.
And almost without fail, nearly everyone we encountered – from white-suited volunteers guiding us between floats to homeless people on 7th and Figueroa – was unfailingly polite, helpful, and friendly, in a way that recalled the Portland minibreak of 2014. The only person I wanted to punch the whole time was one we brought down on the train from north, a cranky old dude who got mouthy as my wife attempted to help him find his bag (which was in a completely different car altogether). Once we were actually inside the Los Angeles perimeter, it was surprisingly pleasant – and I know we were at the Rose Parade, but we were also in the busiest train station in California and on a transit system that basically didn’t exist 25 years ago. And everyone was nice.
And I returned home to yet another bout of digital diarrhea from a big-money Silly Con Valley player – this time it was Paul Graham, whose Y Combinator I’ve already taken to task once in this space. His blatherings have already been dealt with elsewhere, but they are of a piece with similar screeds from the likes of Marc Andressen or Jason Calacanis or Peter Thiel any number of big-money finance types who think that because they’re putting their money into companies that rely on apps or websites, they’re technology moguls, rather than the same sort of banking assholes that ran the economy on the rocks years ago. Paul Graham’s assertions are particularly risible, considering how Y Combinator has become the new Stanford for an industry that brags about ignoring traditional credentials – and how few Y Combinator companies have yet to brave an actual public market for their exorbitant and unrealistic valuations. Or given how its ducklings get a golden net under them when they flame out.
The three counties of Silly Con Valley – San Francisco, San Mateo, and Santa Clara, the latter of which has by some measures the highest per-capita income of any county in America – have all bought into the smell of their own shit. Everything should be like Silly Con Valley. Everything should be a startup. Everyone should move fast and break things, and if you’re not an entrepreneur, then you’re a barnacle on the exciting high-tech future and you’re a Morlock only fit to drive and house the Eloi. And any regulatory interference – indeed, any attempt to hold a light up to these exaggerated claims – is second only to an attempt at collecting regular non-confiscatory 1990s-level tax as a impingement on the freedom of great minds to do as they will. Which is why people are flipping out at the fact that the FDA dared point out that Theranos, the current darling of the “biomedical revolution”, has yet to demonstrate valid results from its much-vaunted blood-test system and is neck-deep in regulatory arbitrage to hide their alleged product from prying eyes that might ask them to prove it works.
That’s the biggest problem with Silly Con Valley, 2016: this is where your future comes from, and the future is based on using tech-washing to bring back the Gilded Age. Underneath the whizzy apps and buzzword compliance, the mission is the same as it was for the likes of Leland Stanford: consolidation of wealth and power, full stop. It’s past time we told the truth: Uber is a taxi company, AirBnB is a hotel company, and “empowering” people to take in others’ washing so they don’t lose their home isn’t innovation, it’s the perfect expression of the “I Got Mine Fuck You” mentality of an industry that lost its way once it decided the most important goal was to let the Eloi abstract away the Morlocks once and for all.
It’s not that Portland was nice, or that Los Angeles was nice, though they were – it’s that in the last five years, this place has become Not Nice. These three counties aren’t Florence during the Renaissance, they’re Wall Street in 1986. And when the crash comes, a lot of these “entrepreneurs” are going to be dangling on the cliff by their fingertips. And at that point, it is incumbent on us as Californians and human beings to lace up the steel-toes and stomp. Hard.